They found that the UK uses detention
“disproportionately and inappropriately”, despite receiving far fewer asylum
applications than its European neighbours.

In their robust and critical report
published on Tuesday, the MPs and Peers said that whoever wins the general
election in May should impose a statutory 28-day time limit on detention for
immigration purposes, introduce automatic bail hearings, and stop detaining
women who are victims of rape and torture. (Detention centre rules already
forbid the detention of people who have been tortured. Regardless
of that, it happens.)

A time limit on
detention is only the first step, said the report. “Most problems could be
resolved simply by not detaining most of the people currently held under
immigration powers,” and the government should work to develop effective
community-based alternatives.

Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, who chaired the
inquiry, said: “The current system is not working. It’s expensive, ineffective
and unjust. We believe the problems that beset our immigration detention estate
occur quite simply because we detain far too many people and for far too long.”

She told
openDemocracy that Channel 4’s story echoed what the panel heard during the
six-month inquiry: “It is very similar to the type of allegations that people
were making to our inquiry in terms of how they experience being detention.”

One woman told
the inquiry: “I can tell you, anybody who is [on] suicide watch has sexual
harassment in Yarl’s Wood, because those male guards they sit in there watching
you at night, sleeping and being naked. You can hear them talking it.”

Another said:
“On one occasion I was showering when a particular officer came into the room,
using his key and without knocking. I
was naked and vulnerable, he apologised but didn’t look away and started a
conversation. I shouted at him to get out, which he did in the end.”

Teather and her
colleagues heard of one recognised trafficking victim who was detained for
more than one year.

The inquiry
report remarked on the wealth of reports over the years documenting evidence of
suffering and abuse of process within immigration centres across the UK. The Parliamentarians
urged Home Office immigration officials to undertake a full literature review.

Sarah Teather
said:

“We are not going to solve this problem by merely tinkering at the edges and
my worry a bit about these exposés is that sometimes the consequences are just
that a few individuals are sacked and that is not going to fix the problem. We
are going to need to do a whole scale review of the way in which we work with
people.”

She went on:

“There is a
culture of mistrust and a culture of misbelief, and a tendency to go heavy on
aggressive enforcement techniques rather than engaging with people. That is not
actually what other countries do, and it is not very effective. And that kind
of culture is what tends to lead to people being treated badly and tends to
lead to an experience of extreme anxiety for individuals who are caught up in it.”

The
right to liberty

In 2013, more than 30,000 men, women and children were
detained in immigration detention centres across the UK, half of them seeking
asylum. Many detention centres are former prisons, while larger centres, such
as Colnbrook and Harmondsworth,
near Heathrow, are built to category B prison standards.

The panel’s key
recommendation is a 28-day limit on detention for immigration purposes. Britain
is the only country in Europe without a time limit on how long it can detain
people subject to immigration controls. European Union rules on immigration and
asylum specify that member-states should only detain people in cases where
deportation is imminent, with a time limit of 6-12 months given. But the UK has
opted out of this directive, and currently detains people for months and
sometimes even years. The Home Office’s own guidance says detention should be
used sparingly and as a last resort, but evidence presented to the inquiry
indicates that people are routinely detained as a matter of course.

Channel 4 News

Examining
immigration statistics, the inquiry found that the longer a person was
detained, the less likely they were to be deported. In many cases people
detained for months or years are eventually released. In written evidence to
the inquiry, the human rights group Liberty said this was “rendering their
detention a human tragedy and a futile violation of the right to liberty”.

Other factors
used to make the case for a 28-day limit include: the severe deterioration in peoples
mental health after more than one month’s detention, the lack of urgency among
Home Office officials in resolving cases and the high cost of detaining people.

Detaining
people is more expensive than case-working them in the community, the committee
found. The estimated cost of running the entire detention estate in 2013 was
£164 million and the cost of detaining one person £32,026. Between 2011 and
2014 the government paid nearly £15 million in unlawful detention cases.

The
Swedish example

Teather’s
committee defined success as higher compliance, which means more voluntary
returns and less litigation, and found this in countries where the system was
fair, transparent and dignified. The report notes that in Sweden, people
seeking asylum were treated with “dignity”, rather than criminalised. Migrants
and refugees register at regional centres, they are assigned a case-worker and
attend regular meetings to discuss and prepare for all possible immigration
outcomes. “This assists individuals to feel they are given a fair hearing and
are empowered and supported to make their own departure arrangements with
dignity.”

Detention really
is used in Sweden only as a last resort; in 2013 the average stay in detention
was five days. That same year nearly 3,000 people passed through Swedish detention,
compared to more than 30,000 in the UK, yet Sweden receives at least twice the
number of asylum applications as the UK.

Sarah Teather
spent a day in a cell at Yarl’s Wood, where around 300 women are held at any
one time. “In comparison to the living conditions in the detention centre in
Sweden, the cell was bare, shabby, impersonal and the centre noisy,” she said.
“Of particular note were the sanitary towels stuck to the air vents in the
walls.” This, she was told, was to block out sounds travelling between the
cells, such as other women screaming or the jangling of the guards’ keys.

In written
evidence to the inquiry the Church of England said:

“What has been
built ... is not just prison-like. It looks like a prison: harsh straight
lines, built to high-security standards, bare of anything to soften the feel of
the interior. It sounds like a prison – large echoing open wings. It feels like
a prison: the attempts to call the places where the detainees sleep a ‘room’ is
confounded by the fact that they are manifestly cells. The toilets have no
seats, just a solid steel bowl. It smells like a prison: that toilet is inside
the cell. In many cases, the detainees – who are prisoners, in any normal sense
of the word – have to eat in those cells beside the toilet.”

Internet access
is arbitrarily restricted. Blocked sites across centres include the BBC,
Facebook, Skype, visitors groups’ websites, Bail for Immigration Detainees,
Amnesty International, and the parliamentary inquiry’s own website. “The
restrictions to sites of groups who offer advice and support to detainees is
inexplicable, particularly given the problems many detainees have accessing
legal representation and advice inside the centres,” the report said.

The
law’s protection

Unlike regular
prisoners, people held in immigration detention have patchy access to bail and
legal representation, the report found. In 1999, the then government included a
clause in the Immigration and Asylum Act allowing for automatic bail hearings
within the first eight days of detention, and another before the 38th day.
According to the inquiry this was never enacted. It was repealed in a later
immigration law in 2002. Laura Dubinsky of Doughty Street Chambers told the
inquiry that in the criminal justice system, “You’re
entitled to legal representation and you’re entitled to disclosure about why you’re
being held. Terrorist detention is 48 hours.”

By contrast, she said, “we have this extraordinary
situation where immigrants who have such difficulties in obtaining legal
representation have barriers of literacy, other vulnerabilities, are expected
to instigate their own bail applications before the tribunal and even instigate
their own challenges in the high court to the legality of their detention, and
that’s an extraordinary state of affairs, and it’s one that’s an anomaly in our
own legal system and an anomaly also in the EU.”

One government
inspector found that of the people held in immigration for more than six
months, nine (16 per cent) had never made a bail application. “This may have
been because detainees were unaware of bail processes and/or had poor legal advice,”
the report says. “A number of detainees said they did not know how to apply for
bail or clearly needed help to navigate the process.”

Some people
remained locked up for a more than a year, only because they could not find a
bail address.

The process of
the bail hearing itself is carried out over a video link from the detention
centres. In theory, judges are guided to grant bail where there is no reason to
detain someone and alternative control measures would suffice. In practice, witnesses
told the inquiry, judges often refuse bail in the mistaken belief that removal is
imminent: “...they too readily accept statements in the Home Office’s Bail
Summary that are not supported by any evidence, and they fail to require the
Home Office to show why detention is necessary and that all alternatives have
been exhaustively pursued,” said Detention Forum in written evidence.

Witnesses
testified to difficulty securing decent legal advice. Kay Everett from the
Immigration Law Practitioners Association says in many cases people weren’t
told about advice surgeries held at detention centres or how to sign up for
them. When they did access surgeries, interviews lasted just 30 minutes, not
enough time to case-work complex asylum applications. One witness said after
six months, they still hadn’t heard back from their solicitor.

“All my friends
in here have the same problem as me. We meet the lawyers, they tell us not to
worry, and then they never come back or even tell us if they've taken our case
or not - and for a few months we are hopeful and think they have. They don't
respond to our calls and we lose hope.”

In their final
recommendations, the MPs and peers call for the Legal Aid Agency and the
Immigration Services Commissioner to carry out regular audits on the quality of
advice provided by contracted law firms in detention centres, and that
contracts be amended to provide more than 30 minutes per client.

Handcuffed in hospital

The
Parliamentarians were shocked by the evidence they heard about healthcare
standards — rudimentary health screening, limited access to medical staff and
delays in receiving treatment, including a woman left for three hours after
having a miscarriage.

One man
described visiting a doctor with four guards and in handcuffs:

“The first time
I went there I was handcuffed with my two hands and they used a long chain to …
one of my hands. So, all the officers that escorted me to cardiologists, they
came into the private room with the consultant. The consultant was very
annoyed. He said, look, I cannot treat my client like this. You handcuff him;
you want to hear my conversation with him. This is not allowed.

“He said he
will not be able to continue with my treatment. So he was talking to them. They
have to release one of the hands for him. He asked me to lie down. All the
officers. Four officers that took me in to the appointment, they were there. I
have to undress in the presence of the officers. He was asking them that two
should go out and two should stay in. They refused. They said they were doing
their job. So, the consultant asked to discharge me, that he will not be able
to continue, because they were interfering into the medical treatment that was
given to me.”

The report
criticises the Home Office practice of detaining people with mental illnesses.
Government inspectors, doctors, nurses, and mental health experts, have warned
against detaining people with mental illnesses for immigration purposes. Six
high court judgements since 2011 found that the detention of mentally ill
people for immigration purposes was a breach of article 3 rights of the
European Convention on Human Rights. The Royal College of Psychiatrists gave
evidence to the inquiry saying Home Office policy in this area reversed the
“presumption against detaining those with mental health conditions”.

Protections in
place, such as rule 35 of detention centre guidelines, to protect vulnerable
people from being detained, are sometimes ignored, the report says. The panel was
shocked that some detention centre staff were unaware that these protections
existed. The charity Medical Justice told the inquiry:

“One client who
disclosed a history of multiple-perpetrator rape by a violent gang was told her
situation did not warrant a Rule 35 report. In the medical notes the doctor
concludes: “rape – private. No Rule 35.”… Another client who reported being the
victim of an ‘honour crime’ was told to ‘go and google torture’ – presumably a
reference to the fact that as the ill treatment did not come at the hands of
state actors it did not qualify as torture.”

The panel has
called on the government to implement a mandatory training programme for all
detention centre staff, which should include dealing with trafficking victims,
survivors of rape and torture, and people with mental health needs. It added
that pregnant women and women who are victims of rape or torture should not be
detained, and gender-specific rules should be implemented in all detention
centres.

When the light gets in

Ruth Grove-White, Policy Director at the Migrants Rights Network said: “This report shines a
light on the devastating impacts of ‘barbed wire Britain’. We welcome the
cross-party recommendations especially a time limit of 28 days on the length of
time anyone can be held in immigration detention. This would have a tremendous
impact on the lives of those currently held indefinitely, without any knowledge
of when they might be released and at the mercy of the Home Office.”

Dr Juliet Cohen, Head of Doctors at Freedom from Torture and a frequent visitor
to immigration detention centres, said:

“The report gives an unflinching
critique of the UK’s immigration detention system and Freedom from Torture
endorses the recommendations made.

“Over the years
many credible reports have made constructive suggestions for the improvement of
the asylum system, and immigration detention specifically, yet few appear to
result in any meaningful action by the Home Office. On this occasion, the
desire to create an effective and fair system must trump any other
consideration.

“Of particular
concern is the safeguard intended to protect vulnerable people, including
torture survivors, from being wrongly routed into detention which has
consistently been found to be failing. This inhumane system must be overhauled
to ensure that vulnerable and traumatised individuals whose detention is for
administrative convenience and no other reason are given the protection they
came to the UK to claim.”

Speaking at the
report’s launch, the MPs referred to the campaign to end the detention of
children as a template for implementation. Work began within a year of the
coalition agreeing the policy, they said.

When asked to
respond to criticism of how the pledge to end the detention of children has
been handled, Sarah Teather said: “I am not claiming that the current system
around child detention is absolutely perfect. There are still some children
going through the system who shouldn’t be there. However, it is dramatically
different. You have gone from a situation of thousands being detained to just a
small handful. Sure the system can still be improved and it demonstrates that
change can happen.

“At this stage
when there is so much negativity and defeatism about change never being
possible, I think it is important to hold up an example of where change has
been possible. And working together with others we have managed to do that.”

On Wednesday,
Channel 4 News released fresh
footage, filmed by a detainee on a secret camera at Harmondsworth, and
handed to Channel 4 by Corporate Watch.

A Home Office
worker, filmed covertly, explains why filming is a bad idea:

“Say you’re in government, right, and you guys are
taking photos of these bad conditions like the rats and whatever other shit
that’s in here and you’re sending that outside sending it to the news or
whatever — that looks bad for the government, doesn’t it? Or these centre fights,
or someone’s cutting themselves and you’re taking pictures of that and sending
it outside and being like, ‘look what’s happening in here’, they don’t like the
bad publicity that would entail.”

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